Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site

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Building a web application that attracts and retains regular visitors is tricky enough, but creating a social application that encourages visitors to interact with one another requires careful planning. This book provides practical solutions to the tough questions you’ll face when building an effective community site — one that makes visitors feel like they’ve found a new home on the Web.

If your company is ready to take part in the social web, this book will help you get started. Whether you’re creating a new site from scratch or reworking an existing site, Building Social Web Applications helps you choose the tools appropriate for your audience so you can build an infrastructure that will promote interaction and help the communit

This review is from: Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site (Paperback)

If you are looking for and how-to guide, with code listings and practical examples you better pick another book. Gavin Bell covers the topic from an architect/designer point of view, he also tends keep in mind the business side of things, something I appreciated. This means the content will be valuable for a long time, since languages, tools and frameworks come and go, while the advice you can get from this book is platform agnostic. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a book with just dry theory, it’s based on solid experience both from first-hand experience by the author and the way some major social applications have been build and evolved

This review is from: Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site (Paperback)

Gavin Bell draws on his extensive experience to offer a well structured guide to adding community elements to a website or application. His book will help any professional planning a social strategy, designing a set of social features, determining the types of relationships to foster among users, and even determining how best to manage change in an existing site or online structure.

Bell covers a wide gamut of issues that a site planner will need to consider, from developing the data schema for people, relationships, and objects; to how best to expose APIs to third-party developers; to the process of rolling out a new product or feature. Anyone developing a social website or app should keep this book handy throughout the process.

Bell and I share a publisher and our titles cover some similar issues. When I first picked up Bell’s finished book I gritted my teeth with envy. As I quickly devoured the book, though, I was relieved (or, at least I convinced myself) that our books are complementary and are each useful in their own way.

If you’re looking for one book to guide you through the entire process, from conception to launch and into the life of a social web application, then this is the book for you.

This review is from: Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site (Paperback)

This book is rich in important ideas and is definitely a must read for those interested in the social web. Unfortunately I suspect that it was either written in haste or (perhaps more likely) the author was still working out his ideas as he wrote it, because it is extremely repetitive. This constant reiteration does make the reading experience rather more hard work than it should be because the underlying material is strong and valuable. I am entirely confident that in the next addition he can easily take out 100 pages and the book will be the stronger for it. This is Gavin’s first book and I don’t think he was well served by his publisher. A competent editor could and should have pointed out the large areas of duplication. Nonetheless, and to repeat myself :), it is a must read.